Michèle Fitoussi was born in Tunisia to French parents ...static.booktopia.com.au/pdf/9780732293796-1.pdf · Michèle Fitoussi was born in Tunisia to French parents, and has lived

Michèle Fitoussi was born in Tunisia to French parents, and

has lived in Paris since the age of five. She has worked for the

past twenty-five years at Elle magazine and has interviewed

many influential decision makers and world leaders in areas

as varied as politics, human sciences, sports, literature and

the media.

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HELENA

RUBINSTEIN

Michèle Fitoussi

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HarperCollinsPublishers

First published in Australia in 2012by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty LimitedABN 36 009 913 517harpercollins.com.au

Copyright © Michèle Fitoussi 2012

Translated by Kate Bignold and Lakshmi Ramakrishnan IyerTranslation copyright © Susanna Lea Associates

The right of Michèle Fitoussi to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no partmay be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, inany form or by any means, without the prior written permisson of the publisher.

HarperCollinsPublishersLevel 13, 201 Elizabeth Street, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia31 View Road, Glenfield, Auckland 0627, New ZealandA 53, Sector 57, Noida, UP, India77–85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB, United Kingdom2 Bloor Street East, 20th floor, Toronto, Ontario M4W 1A8, Canada10 East 53rd Street, New York NY 10022, USA

ISBN: 978 0 7322 9379 6

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Contents

Preface

Exile Kazimierz The Rubinstein familyA Merciless New World A Tough Apprenticeship243 Collins StreetBeauty Is PowerBack to Her RootsEdward William TitusMayfair Lady 24 Grafton Street Rich and Famous Paris, Here I Come!Beauty Enlightening the WorldThe Great Rubinstein Road Tour Paris is a Moveable FeastFriend to ArtistsBeauty Becomes Big BusinessThe Little Lady Takes on Wall Street

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Mourning for HappinessFamily LifeStay Young!Who is the Fairest of Them All?Princess GourielliWatching the War from New YorkA Castle in the SkyRebuilding Once Again The Pink JungleThe Last Man in her LifeThe First Lady of Beauty Science Playing Her Final HandThe Show Must Go OnNobody Lives Forever The Empire Without Its EmpressEndnotesBibliographyAcknowledgements

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P R E F A C E

‘My life seems to have contained enough events, great and small,

enough stress and strain to fill a half-dozen normal lifes.’1

Helena Rubinstein

People often ask me why I became interested in Helena

Rubinstein. There is something mysterious about first

encounters. So while we can never say exactly how things

happen — most of the time, it is a question of chance — we do

know the ways in which a person’s story has marked us.

In this case, I knew nothing about her other than her name

on beauty products that I didn’t use, but the opening lines of her

life story were enough: she was born in 1872 in Kazimierz, the

Jewish quarter of Kraków; she had seven younger sisters —

Pauline, Rosa, Regina, Stella, Ceska, Manka and Erna; and at

the age of twenty-four she set off on a journey to Australia,

armed with a parasol, twelve jars of cream, and an inexhaustible

supply of chutzpah.

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My imagination immediately began to run away with me.

I saw her taking the train, her forehead pressed thoughtfully

against the window, reciting her sisters’ names like a mantra.

I saw her four-foot-ten frame walking up the gangplank to

board the ship that would sail halfway round the globe, taking

two months to reach Australia. I saw this tiny pioneer

disembarking in Melbourne, in this foreign land; I saw how she

struggled, how she nearly gave up, then triumphed.

Even though I didn’t know a great deal about her, Helena

Rubinstein became for me a romantic heroine, a sort of Polish

Scarlett O’Hara, a conqueror with a character forged of steel. As

she stood there in her high heels, her motto — for she was

someone who despised the past — could have been ‘Onwards!’

As the saying goes, ‘Give a girl the right shoes, and she can

conquer the world.’

A quick look at her tumultuous life confirmed my suspicions.

She was little known and has been virtually forgotten, but her

extraordinary life spanned nearly a century (she died in 1965 at

the age of ninety-three) and four continents.

Driven by courage, intelligence and a will to succeed that

would make her neglect her husbands, children and family,

she built an empire that was both industrial and financial.

More impressive still, she as good as invented modern

cosmetics and ways to make them accessible to all. This was

no easy task for a woman in those days — and it still isn’t,

whatever one might think; a woman who was poor, foreign

and Jewish, to boot. But she loftily disregarded all four of

these disadvantages — and it’s anyone’s guess which one was

the greatest — and often turned them into strengths. She

opened her first beauty institute in Melbourne in 1902, the

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same year Australian women were among the first in the

world to obtain the right to vote. Helena would always be

a firm supporter of women in their movement for equality,

which throughout the twentieth century, meant not only

fighting for their most basic rights, but also for the liberation

of their bodies — first by freeing them from the shackles of

the corset, then from the taboo of wearing make-up (until the

early 1920s cosmetics were only worn by prostitutes and

actresses).

As Helena would like to say, beauty is anything but

frivolous. For her it was a ‘new power’, a means through

which women could assert their independence. To want to

charm or look your best are not signs of subservience if you

know how to use them to your advantage. Helena believed

that women must use the assets placed at their disposal if they

are to conquer the world, or at least to make their place in it.

Cosmetics existed before Helena Rubinstein — they have

existed since antiquity! — but she was the visionary who created

modern beauty: scientific, rigorous and demanding, with an

emphasis on moisturising, protecting against the harmful rays

of the sun, massage, electricity, hydrotherapy, hygiene, diet,

nutrition, physical exercise and surgery.

Her passion for art and aesthetics of every kind — painting,

sculpture, architecture, furniture, decoration, haute couture,

jewellery — drove her to become an obsessive collector (she was

nicknamed ‘a female Hearst’) and inspired the colours of her

make-up collections.

It was her innate sense of marketing that led her not only

to promote her products successfully, but also to constantly

invent sales techniques at her salons and retail outlets, to set

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professional standards for beauticians, and to use advertising

as early as in 1904.

She worked tirelessly and claimed that work was the best

beauty treatment: ‘Work has been indeed my best beauty

treatment. I believe in hard work. It keeps the wrinkles out of

the mind and the spirit. It helps to keep a woman young.’2 She

amassed a fortune almost single-handedly. She was known to

be one of the richest women in the world: only a handful of

peers had succeeded as well as her in the domain of beauty and

fashion. Coco Chanel, Elizabeth Arden, and Estée Lauder were

the few women who shared Helena Rubinstein’s gift for putting

themselves on stage and promoting their image.

She started out as Helena (or ‘He-LAY-na’, as she would

pronounce it in America with her Yiddish-tinged Polish

accent) then, as she became more successful, she would be

known as Madame. That was what everyone called her, even

members of her own family. Indeed, inside her there were two

people: Helena the rebel, adventurer, lover; and Madame the

businesswoman, billionaire and princess late in life.

My preference lies toward the younger woman, with her

rebellious, reckless streak; but the older one continues to

fascinate me. The portraits of her at this time tell us a great deal

about her. Despite her expensive clothes and jewellery and lavish

surroundings, she has the face of a Jewish grandmother, hard

and frail at the same time. And that is what she was despite

appearances, that is who she had never stopped being: the ‘little

lady from Kraków’3 who all her life had struggled to master the

proper etiquette.

During the long months I spent in the company of this

visionary woman, I learned something new every day about her

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anticipation of trends and fashions, her gift for coming up with

new ideas, her incredible ability to live through different eras,

countries, wars, fashions, mores, always in the thick of things:

the emancipation of Australian women; the belle époque in

Europe; London of the 1910s as it shook off Victorian

puritanism; the artistic and literary Montparnasse of the roaring

twenties; the pre-war years in Paris and New York; the

reconstruction of the 1950s and the democratisation of beauty;

the 1960s and the advent of consumerism. And through it all lies

the recurrent theme of women on their long march toward

freedom.

Her life, which was stranger than fiction, reads like a

historical and geographical compendium — she couldn’t sit still,

so she travelled by boat, train or plane, from one continent to

the next, the way other people take the bus. It also featured, as

does any saga, its share of drama, heartbreak, personal tragedy

and great solitude.

She had her faults, and they were countless: she could be

authoritarian, demanding, tyrannical, despotic, cruel, miserly,

selfish, deceitful and even downright insensitive, but by the same

token she could be generous, kind, attentive, charming, shy,

open, tolerant, and wickedly funny. Like many people of her ilk,

she was a living paradox, excessive, larger-than-life, even ‘over

the top’, as Suzanne Slesin, her son Roy’s daughter-in-law titled

a book about her a few years ago.4

Her principal vanity, when late in life she took only a few

minutes to do her hair and make-up, ever mindful not to waste

time, was mendacity. She lied about everything, starting with her

own age — she felt this was the best way to stay young and was

more effective than any anti-wrinkle cream.

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Like other celebrities eager to forge their own legend, she was

constantly rewriting her own life, transforming it to suit her —

hiding, veiling, misrepresenting, embellishing, exaggerating,

preparing a dream for posterity. Rumors abound, as do

inventions, contradictions, fables. Unto those that have shall

more be given, and Helena was no exception to the rule. But at

the same time, grey areas remain, although the documents,

autobiographies, biographies, newspaper articles, administrative

documents and testimonies of both the dead and living who

knew her — and there are not many of this last category left —

can shed some light on her life as a whole.

‘She won’t hold it against you if you re-create the legend yet

again,’ exclaimed her cousin Litka Fasse, during our first

interview. ‘Madame always lied about her life.’ She added, after

a moment of silence, ‘What mattered most to her was to be

talked about.’

Madame often said, ‘If I hadn’t done it, someone else would

have.’

Perhaps true. But she came first.

Michèle Fitoussi

June 2010

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E X I L E

From the moment she boarded the Prinz Regent Luitpold,

a German liner that travelled back and forth between Europe

and Australia, Helena Rubinstein felt as if she were in a state of

weightlessness. She was free.

And while she might have sensed that a trying adventure lay

ahead, she savoured every second of her miraculous journey,

even if she didn’t really know what to expect at the other end.

She had hardly had time to realise that by leaving her country,

she would at last be able to change her life and be who she

wanted to be. She had no idea how she would go about it. And

yet she hadn’t hesitated when her family suggested emigration to

her. In spite of all the real or imagined dangers that might lie

ahead — shipwreck, accidents, and fatal diseases, not to

mention encounters with the wrong crowd — she had agreed to

set off on her own, to go thousands of miles from her native

Poland to join three uncles she had never met before.

It was May 1896. Helena was twenty-four years old, with all

her worldly belongings in an old trunk. There were days when

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her chest seemed to swell with all the desires she kept pent up

inside until it felt like her heart might explode. She wanted to

open her arms wide and embrace the world.

Despite the anxiety that had occasionally gripped her since

she embarked in Genoa, she marvelled at what was going on

around her. For the first time in her life, she actually felt

something approaching happiness. When the weather was fine

she went on deck and stared out at the ocean, fascinated by the

changing light on the shifting waves: how she wished she could

capture every nuance!

When it was too windy on deck, she would explore the

gangways in cabin class, stopping at the music room or at the

door to the smoking room, browsing through the books in the

library. At the bar she would order a cup of tea and some

fruitcake, savouring the pleasure of drinking out of china and

using real silverware. Afterwards she would luxuriate in a plush

sofa to read or embroider. Not once did she think about her

family who had stayed behind in Kazimierz, the neighbourhood

in Kraków where she grew up. She was not prone to nostalgia,

at least not yet.

Fortunately she did not suffer from the seasickness that had

consigned so many of her fellow passengers to their berths. In

her thirst for discovery, she would even go down into steerage,

evading the watchful eyes of the grumpy stewards who forbade

passengers from going from one class to another. The sight of

these scores of immigrants was wrenching: men and women all

crowded together on the deck, lying next to each other moaning

or shouting, vomiting their guts up on the floor. The stench of

fuel, greasy food and unwashed bodies made her ill. She would

hurry away again, fearful she might forfeit her spot on the upper

2


deck were she to be discovered down below, as if she might

somehow be forceed to stay down there as punishment for

trespassing. But that was the reaction of a poor person, and in a

shot she was angry with herself for having felt that way.

One morning, leaning against the railing, with a parasol to

protect her delicate skin (the sun, woman’s mortal enemy!)

she looked out, fascinated by the port of Bombay where the

steamer had just docked. In the foreign crowd swarming on

the quay below her she saw poverty, even more stark there in

the harsh sunlight than in the hardships of a Polish winter. She

avoided looking at the crippled beggars, the coolies dressed in

their cotton loincloths, the ragged children running after the

Europeans; instead her gaze lingered on the Indian women in

their brightly coloured saris, or the English ladies buttoned up

to their chins despite the heat as they scolded the porters

struggling with their luggage.

Before Bombay, the ship had stopped at Naples, Alexandria,

Aden, and Port Said. On each occasion, Helena would study the

crowds of people, then allow herself a short stroll along the port,

weaving unsteadily as if she were still on board the rocking ship.

Surrounded by itinerant peddlers, she stopped eagerly to

rummage through their trinkets. With a serious expression and a

frown on her brow, as if her entire life depended on it, she

haggled with ease, counting on her fingers to make herself

understood, then, at a price she had set herself, she bought glass

jewellery, betel, pigments, ointments and powder, musk, amber,

essences, tea, sequins and a few lengths of shimmering fabric.

Everywhere she went she would look at the women,

fascinated by their exotic, changing beauty. The blonde, pale

3


Italians of Liguria; the plump Neapolitans; the Egyptians and

Yemenites, who were invisible save for eyes that burned beneath

the veil; the Ethiopians with their fine features; the Asians with

their gentle faces. All of them — old, young, ugly and even the

little girls clinging to their mothers — had their own particular

charm, a way about them, with kohl-rimmed eyes, sparkling

teeth that made their olive skin darker still, heavy jewellery

around their necks, arms or ankles, bright clothing, and perfume

so rich and pungent it made her head spin.

Helena was more used to the fogs of Eastern Europe, and

would shield her eyes. There was too much light, too much

noise, too much of a crowd and too many dazzling colours; and

yet she was absorbing it all, avidly, to keep for later.

Helena had a long line of admirers on board. Two young

Italians, to begin with, who didn’t understand a word of either

Polish or Yiddish, and who invited her to dance every night with

an ingenious display of mime. Her scant knowledge of German

helped to establish closer ties. Then there was the Englishman

with the moustache who spoke as if he had a red-hot potato

in his mouth. Whenever he turned to Helena, his ruddy face

seemed to catch fire. ‘Oh, Miss Helena, you’re so pretty.’

Miss Helena wasn’t a real beauty, but her charm had an

immediate effect. Her tiny size made her look like a little girl

wearing heels that were too high. But her legs were slim, her

bust shapely, and her figure had not yet filled out with age. She

wore her black hair in a chignon low on her neck, pulled back

from her ears and brow. Her features were regular, with high

cheekbones, straight lips and skin so pale it was translucent. The

first thing you noticed about her was her large, widespread eyes,

4


with their velvety darkness, at times pensive, at times inquiring.

‘A gaze of precision and observation, the kind of look you can

tell excels at counting, examining files and numbers, studying

formulas, or dreaming endlessly about beautiful things.’1 At

times, too, they could shoot daggers. Her seven sisters

nicknamed her ‘the Eagle’.2

From the start, she intrigued her admirers. She was a young

woman travelling alone, and seemingly not at all frightened: this

was virtually unheard of at the time. Only loose women dared to

travel without chaperones. But her silence and restraint, along

with a certain hardness in her eyes, soon made them realise she

wasn’t that kind of woman.

And while Helena enjoyed having a good time, she quickly

set her limits. Her shyness kept her from going too far. Besides,

what would her mother think? The strict principles of Gitel

Rubinstein, known as Gitte, her prudishness and sense of virtue,

were too well embedded in Helena. ‘Every kiss seemed immoral

to me, and the mysteries of sex remained … mysteries.’3 It would

take time for her to let her guard down. She received no fewer

than three marriage proposals in the course of the journey, and

three times she turned her suitors down with a smile, as if each

proposal was some boyish prank. She did not envisage a future

tied to a man.

Every evening, after a few polkas in the ballroom, the young

men gathered around her. The fifty or so passengers in cabin

class had very quickly become acquainted. Shipboard romances

blossomed. Attachments formed, seemingly indestructible, then

dissolved when the journey ended. The men on board were

brokers, explorers, gold prospectors, French officers, British

diplomats, missionaries; the women were mistresses, dowagers,

5


the wives of high-ranking officials. There was even a theatre

troupe on tour. Helena befriended two Englishwomen who, like

her, were on their way to Australia. The first, Lady Susanna, was

travelling with her husband, the aide-de-camp to Lord

Lamington, Governor of Queensland. The other, Helen

MacDonald, lived in Melbourne and was about to be married.

Before leaving the ship, Helena wrote down their addresses. She

already had a knack for networking.

In the cabin class salon, the heat was stifling despite the

ceiling fans. Helena sipped an iced tea to cool down. Her gaze

glided over the wood panelling, the rosewood tables, the

silverware and china dinner services, the crystal chandeliers, the

tall sparkling mirror reflecting her face. All this refinement

enchanted her. Then she went to join the little groups who were

chattering gaily. Her hawk-like eyes recorded every detail — the

clothes the women were wearing, their deportment, their

hairstyles, the way they held their fans, the way they laughed or

remained silent.

During the day she watched them play tennis or whist, and

tried to memorise the rules. She knew so little about this world

where everything seemed easy that she took in every detail and

stored it all up for future use. She was completely ignorant when

it came to social codes, manners, and even the art of

conversation, which explained her stubborn silence. Another

reason was — and always would be, no matter what she did —

the fear of being judged because of her background. Even if she

learned as she went along — and she was a quick learner —

there would always be gaps she could not fill. Neither her

fortune, nor her good taste, nor the lies she told to embellish her

life would ever fill those gaps.

6


In the course of her very long life she would make other

journeys from one continent to another. The sun would never set

on her empire — the empire of beauty. But this first voyage was

a seminal one and would leave its imprint: a taste for adventure,

luxury, and beauty. To get what she wanted, Helena was

prepared to work relentlessly; she had been brought up the hard

way and was not afraid of work. And although she didn’t yet

know which way she was headed, she was already using

everything in her power to overcome the limited existence to

which her station in life might otherwise have condemned her.

Nature had given her every asset for success: boldness,

energy, obstinacy, and intelligence. All she needed now was luck,

and she promised herself she would push that luck. She knew

there would be obstacles to overcome, but she believed in her

destiny and refused to let herself down.

7


K A Z I M I E R Z

She was born Chaja Rubinstein, the eldest daughter of Hertzel

Naftaly Rubinstein and Augusta Gitel Silberfeld, on 25

December 1872, under the sign of Capricorn.1 She so despised

her first name that she changed it as soon as she left the

country: on the passenger list of the Prinz Regent Luitpold she

was registered as Helena Juliet Rubinstein, aged twenty.

Four years younger than she really was: that was her way of

thumbing her nose at the passage of time. She would always lie

about her age and tell untruths about other details of her life

with equal aplomb. Her earliest passports stated 1880 as the

year of her birth.2 Administrative bodies were not very particular

at the time, and besides, she did look ten years younger. ‘I’ve

always thought a woman owed it to herself to treat the subject

of her age with ambiguity’, she dictated for the opening pages of

her autobiography at the ripe old age of ninety-three.3

Her place of birth, Kazimierz, was founded in 1335 by the

Polish King Kazimir III as a separate fortified city next to

Kraków, the capital. One hundred and fifty years later, all

8


Kraków’s Jews were ordered to live inside its walls. Over the

centuries, the Jewish town of Kazimierz expanded alongside the

Christian capital of Kraków, and benefited from varying degrees

of protection from Polish sovereigns. Hertzel Rubinstein often

told his daughter that in those days there was a fair amount of

cultural cross-fertilisation with the rest of Europe. Jews came to

the city from France, England, Italy, Spain and Bohemia, fleeing

persecution.

The political situation, however, was unstable. Coveted by its

neighbours, Poland was constantly invaded. In 1772, a first

partition divided Poland (then part of the Polish-Lithuanian

Commonwealth) into three territories: Austria annexed an area

containing the two major cities Kraków and Lemberg and called

it Galicia, while the rest of the union was divided between

Russia to the east and Prussia to the west and north. A second

partition took place in 1793. A third, two years later, destroyed

the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth once and for all. In 1815,

the Congress of Vienna created a fourth division, the Congress

Kingdom of Poland, while Kraków, of which Kazimierz was

now a suburb, was made an autonomous republic until the

middle of the century. The city preserved its Polish heritage but,

as with all of Galicia, remained a dependency of the Austro-

Hungarian Empire.

Torn apart, Poland still refused to submit. Successive revolts

for independence were met with bloody repression, which only

served to intensify the nationalist movement. At the same time,

waves of political emigrants left Poland, most of them headed

for France — a brilliant community of painters, writers,

musicians, and aristocrats for whom nostalgia served as artistic

inspiration. Among them were Frédéric Chopin and poet

9


Adam Mickiewicz. Many of the country’s great masterpieces

were created outside of Poland.

Austria-Hungary claimed to be a civilised nation that allowed

its subjects to live in peace. The fate of the Jews was somewhat

more tolerable there than elsewhere. In 1822, when the walls of

Kazimierz were demolished, the richest and most determined

Jews settled in the Christian district. In 1867, Emperor Franz

Joseph finally granted them full rights. When Helena was born,

Galicia, and all of Poland along with it, was in the feverish

throes of modernisation. Railways, factories, and apartment

buildings were being built, cities were expanding and streets

were being widened, paved with stones and fitted with

streetlamps and gutters.

With 26 000 Jews, a quarter of its population, Kraków

became an important centre for Judaism. Synagogues and

religious schools — yeshivot and cheders — were built.

Increasing numbers of young people attended secondary school

and university, breaking down social barriers. Jewish officials

were elected. Galicia’s Jewish doctors, lawyers, dentists, writers,

poets, actors and musicians outnumbered Poles and Ukrainians

in their respective professions.

Well-to-do families lived in the centre of town, in vast

townhouses like those of the Catholics, filled with books,

paintings, mirrors, tapestries and expensive furniture. The

Orthodox community and poor Jews — who were often one

and the same — stayed behind in Kazimierz. This was the case

for Hertzel Rubinstein and his family. In spite of the economic

boom, the vast majority of Jews still lived in poverty in Galicia,

particularly in the countryside. In town, the artisans, tailors,

carpenters, milliners, jewellers, and opticians fared somewhat

10


better. But most importantly, assimilation was under way. The

Jewish elite was becoming Polish.

However, anti-Semitism was by no means a thing of the past.

As a child, Helena lay in bed and heard the adults talk in hushed

voices about the pogroms. They described everything in detail:

shtetls burned to the ground, synagogues desecrated, houses

destroyed, mothers and daughters raped, babies thrown alive

into the flames, old men forced to whip their peers, fathers

massacred with pitchforks by Polish peasants, impaled by

Ukrainian bayonets, scythed by Cossack sabres. Bloody

nightmares haunted the sleep of the Rubinstein sisters: men

hanging from their hands, shreds of flesh torn off, eyes gouged

and tongues ripped out, heads cut off for soldiers to kick

around.

Those Jews who could left in waves for less hostile countries.

Between 1881 and 1914, 300 000 fled slaughter, war and

poverty, emigrating to America or to Australia. Among them

were Gitel’s three brothers — John, Bernhard, and Louis

Silberfield — to whom Helena would eventually be sent.

Kraków was also an intellectual centre with theatres, publishing

houses, literary salons, concert halls, and secret societies. There

was the Jagiellonian University, the second oldest in Central

Europe; Helena liked to tell a story of how she studied medicine

there for a few months, before being forced to drop out because

she couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

In reality, she didn’t even finish secondary school.4 She

attended the Jewish school in Kazimierz but at the age of

sixteen, as was customary for girls of her social class, she had to

end her studies. She did so reluctantly because she liked learning.

11


She had a quick intellect and a thirst for knowledge. Her

favourite subjects were mathematics, literature, and history,

particularly that of her country. She felt Polish to the depths of

her soul.

And Jewish too. It couldn’t be any other way with such a

pious, well-respected family. Both branches of her family, the

Rubinsteins and the Silberfelds, boasted several rabbis, wise

men, scholars, and men of the Book. Her father’s side could

trace their lineage back to the famous Rashi of Troyes, one of

the most famous authors of commentary on the Bible and the

Talmud.5 Salomon Rubinstein, Helena’s great-grandfather, had

been a rabbi. His son Aryeh, a cattle dealer, had three children,

of which Hertzel Naftaly Rubinstein, Helena’s father, was the

eldest.

The family came from Dukla, a little town in the

Carpathians. That’s where Hertzel was born in 1840, and where

he married Augusta Gitel Silberfeld, his cousin on his mother’s

side. Gitel was born in 1844, and was the ninth child of

nineteen, of whom over half died before the age of twenty. Her

father, Solomon Zale Silberfeld, had been a moneylender;

Helena’s eagerness for social promotion transformed him into

a ‘banker’.

The year before Helena’s birth, Hertzel and Gitel Rubinstein

settled in Kraków at 14 Szeroka Street, a narrow red stone

building. As the family expanded — of the couple’s fifteen

children, only eight daughters would survive — they moved

house frequently, but always stayed in the vicinity of Joszefa

Street. That’s where Hertzel Rubinstein ran a sort of bazaar,

selling a bit of everything: eggs and preserves, huge barrels filled

with herring, jars of pickles, candles, wheat and barley in bulk,

12


kerosene. Walking in, the smell of brine and oil was

overwhelming. Hertzel did not make a good living from his store

but he did his best to feed his family. ‘Jews didn’t have an easy

time of it in those days, we were people of very modest means,

with virtually no money,’ Helena would confess, much later on,

in a rare moment of candour about her early years.6

The house where she was born stood close to five of

Kazimierz’s seven synagogues: the High synagogue, the Old

synagogue, Popper’s, Remuh, and Kupa. It was also near the

mikveh, a ritual bathhouse where women went to cleanse

themselves at the end of the week. The days were governed by

the times for worship, the seasons and the holy days. Every

morning and evening, Helena would hear the prayers and chants

as they rose toward the heavens.

Her district was a labyrinth of paved streets, flanked on

either side by large, balconied houses of wood or stone. It was

home to all manner of shops, printing presses, newspapers,

banks, cafés, markets, wedding houses, schools, cemeteries, and

a hospital. On the shopfronts, names were written in Polish and

Yiddish. Between the Miodowa, Dajwor, Wawrzynca, Bartosza

and Joszefa streets and Nowy Square, prosperity and poverty

lived side by side, as did culture and ignorance, religion and

profanity.

Rabbis with payot in long black coats walked past pious Jews

in fur hats and bearded Hasidim wearing belted caftans over

trousers tucked into boots. Notables in their top hats

ceremoniously greeted old men in velvet skullcaps as they

scurried past with their sacred leather-bound tomes beneath

their arms. Women in wigs, their heads covered with a stole or

an embroidered bonnet, shooed away little boys with caps

13


pulled down over their curls. Gaunt students clustered outside

their yeshivot, endlessly debating a paragraph from the Talmud.

In the summer everyone lived outdoors in the street, or kept

their windows wide open. From her bedroom, Helena could

hear weeping, arguments, matrons shouting to each other from

balconies where laundry was hung out to dry and the cries of

waterbearers calling to their customers. Carts filled with bricks

or hay, drawn by skeletal horses, regularly blocked the road,

forcing everyone to make a detour.

Yentas, or busybodies, sprawled on tiny folding chairs,

gossiped malevolently about their neighbours and scolded the

small children chasing each other along the passageways

between the courtyards. Peddlers displayed their wares on

trestles piled high with precariously balanced treasures — old

clothes, worn shoes, umbrellas, prayer shawls, books,

phylacteries, and menorahs. Craftsmen repaired broken

furniture in the street, while young girls went to fill their buckets

at the fountain. From early morning, the neighbourhood buzzed

with people at work, from cobblers, fishmongers and

pawnbrokers to an old woman on her balcony embroidering

trousseaus for the rich.

In the poorest areas, there were cries and insults, people

shouting out in Yiddish, Polish, and German; crates were

unloaded in the dust, and the streets ran ankle deep with refuse

while buckets of dirty water were poured out onto the

pavement. The stench of rotting fruit, cat’s urine, smoked meat,

onions, cumin, salted cucumbers and offal wafted on the thick

air. In winter, the temperature could drop to thirty below, and

icy gusts heaped snowdrifts along the pavements. The pitiless

cold gripped you body and soul, walls rotted from the damp,

14


and a leaden grey sky hung over the city. When the snow melted,

the streets filled with a muddy slush that ruined shoes and

skirt hems.

Helena Rubinstein always preferred to keep silent about that

chapter of her life, as if she were ashamed of it. She preferred to

talk about Planty botanical gardens or Saint Anne’s church. She

would rather chat away about the aristocrats’ stately homes

where she dreamed of being a guest and would later claim she

had been. Depending on her mood, she might describe Kraków

as a cultured, elegant city, or merely dreary and provincial. The

reality lies somewhere in between, although the city boasts an

abundance of medieval and gothic monuments — the royal

castle of Wawel; the tomb of the Polish kings, which overlooks

the city; the ramparts of the old town surrounded by the

Botanical Gardens; St Mary’s Basilica; St Catherine’s Church;

and the observatory. And the grandiose central marketplace, the

Rynek, common to all Polish cities, with its famous Cloth Hall.

Whenever she could, Helena would leave Kazimierz behind

to head down Stradom Street, then Grodska Street, to stroll past

the stalls beneath the arcades. Here there were no Jews in

greatcoats, or gossiping housewives, or wretched street urchins.

The men sported top hats and derbies; the women wore fine

milliners’ creations.

Young Helena admired the displays on the stalls as if she

wanted to learn them by heart. She hadn’t a single zloty in her

purse, but she dreamed of being able, someday, to buy lace and

silk and fur, diamonds and pearls and crystal. When she was rich

she would strut about like these distinguished Polish women

strolling around the square wrapped in their pelisses, or travel

like the ladies she glimpsed in fine carriages pulled by elegant

15


horses — instead of going everywhere on foot, through the mud,

dragging her sisters behind her, as she had to do now.

Very early on, Helena mastered the art of transforming the

episodes of her life, embellishing or blurring facts as she saw fit.

Her imagination knew no bounds, so much so that it is difficult

to know where the truth lies. She was more of a fabricator than

a liar. She would spend her entire life painstakingly stitching

together her personal legend, indifferent to any contradictions in

her story.

And yet the reality is infinitely more interesting than the story

she stubbornly enhanced. She may have wanted to deny it, but

the fact remains that she came from these dark streets, these

impoverished alleyways, these poorly paved courtyards with

their prayer houses and cheders — an entire Jewish world that

seemed immutable, rooted in the shtetls and ghettos of Galicia,

Poland, or Ukraine, and which has vanished forever.

The harsh environment where she spent the first twenty-four

years of her life inspired her with the passion to leave it behind.

It was where she found her strength of character, her courage,

and her adaptability, like any emigrant who makes a new life

elsewhere.

But she was an impoverished Jewish woman, born in Poland

at the end of the nineteenth century.

This meant that she was a nobody.

16


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